RAM right or wrong?

[Urgan]

I've always understood that hard disc sizes get exaggerated by sellers
dividing by 1000 instead of 1024. I also understand about usable disc
space being less than quoted sizes due to sectorisation.

But I've never come across this before..

My new Dell laptop was sold as having 1024MB RAM. Both Vista and the
BIOS report the amount of RAM as 894MB. Dell CS have used both the
reasons in the first paragraph as reasons for the discrepancy. The other
suggested reason is that some of the RAM is shared with the video card -
but why as the Radeon Xpress 1150 has 256MB of its own?

Can someone explain please?

[westmatrix99]

If you are running windows then there is your problem, also DELL is good but not trustworthy, try getting a bios update.
Cheers

[NancyJ]

My mum had that problem, I dont know whether windows was reporting incorrectly (ask your bios - its usually more reliable) or one of the chips was faulty. I gave her some of my old ram sticks and they all reported the correct size.

[oracleguy]

Some video cards in laptops have some physical memory and the rest is shared system memory. Like the "256"MB of the video card, 64 or 128 might be dedicated video memory and the rest is taken from the system memory.

[westmatrix99]

I dont know whether windows was reporting incorrectly


That's a good one it's like this oxymoron: Microsoft Works

Cheers

[westmatrix99]

Posted the same thing twice, ODD!
Anyways that is a good point there "oracleguy"
Good someone knows their A+ stuff.

Windows what a laugh!
Cheers

[Mhtml]

Just so you guys know this was spam ;). A clever attempt at it too, but alas it is no match for CF moderators.

http://groups.google.lt/group/alt.comp.hardware/msg/ec41c7d7f0526a11
http://groups.google.de/group/alt.comp.hardware/msg/3f11e4452d498cc4
http://groups.google.nl/group/alt.comp.hardware/msg/6051860fe9837cc1

[westmatrix99]

Hi moderator
Howcome I am unable to edit my first few posts, but can now?
Cheers

[infotechweb]

it all depends on the hardware that your system is running, ie the more technically insane the piece of hardware the more RAM needed to operate it. I agree with the BIOS update.